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Dec 20, 2025
This is a good one.
Recurring and relevant themes center around adulthood and what it means, childhood wonder and joy, mysticism and coming to terms with it, hope against oppression, totalitarian control and standing against it (please, don't go bashing people's limbs apart, it's a shounen after all), understanding your spaces, understanding trust, understanding conflicting and selfish desires, understanding sexuality, staying creative and unconventional, understanding yourself and your role in the world. Among others.
Sanda is a home run that really handles itself maturely. It juggles a 14 year old's impulses with those of an immortal god-being well. It shows progress in every character every time they're
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shown on screen. It handles coming of age in an understandable and, of course, anime manner. When characters speak, they do so with reason. When people feel something, it's because it matters. Most of this highlights the human condition and it's really appreciated in this setting.
The tone is relevant to modern society at large - declining birth rate, children being prized above all else, childhood wonder being erased by the system. If you have kids, as I do, you'll find this deeply resonant. What is school teaching? What is society versus conformity? What is tradition versus fantasy? What is hope versus totalitarianism? This is such a good show that handles all of that - believe it or not - well. Questioning one's self as the core of this show and, wow, does it handle it better than the rest of the flock.
Usually, I'd go into negatives. FLCL's sequels sucked, etc. Here, it's not so much as negatives as things I can't really think of ways they'd improve of. I'm a big fan of the style and how it's all presented. The pace is solid and marches onward, not wasting a beat. People progress in meaningful ways and characters actually grow as they will. It's really good and only gets better when you have children because as a parent, you'll find yourself wondering many of the tones and settings presented here, yourself.
Set yourself in the time you were 14 or 15, most characters are 14, and remember what it was like. Remember what you had to handle and watch this with an open mind. It's great. (Please, keep it up. I'll give a 10 if it doesn't end on a nonsense cliffhanger or ditch its current, relevant themes. That's as close as it'll get to Monster for me.)
It's truly great. This is one of those shows you walk away from with introspection. It is understandable and relatable and I really appreciate its tone throughout the entire experience. Sanda explores maturity, death, coming of age, understanding yourself in the world, negotiation and compromise, the power of faith and belief, and more in an interesting and fun format. I truly appreciate this show for what it brings. Some folks may not appreciate how it ends - but there's the charm of it. It's a coming to terms with reality you don't get really anywhere else. This is a good one. Watch it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Oct 31, 2025
This movie felt hollow and pointless. It started out alright with a basic premise of getting another stella. However, that devolved, in the end, to unthinkable levels of action and superhuman abilities bestowed to both Loid and Yor to just blow stuff up.
You start with a simple thing - a family trip to learn a new recipe to impress a teacher. You get packed, you agonize over yourself, you get up and go. You eat a chocolate you find in a baggage hold. (Was it a plane? I don't care to look it up.) You enjoy a trip to the northern lands, places of snow
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and cold, and enter a pleasant restaurant. Alright, cool. However, this is where it just stops mattering. None of it cares about itself or the show as a whole and this movie is just standalone nonsense at this point.
The military police enters and steals the desert Anya wanted because they're scum. The main bad guy is their leader and he has a good nose. This matters because Loid loses to him in a guessing game of how much sugar and such was used to make said desert - or some such - forcing Loid to go on a fetch quest.
At some point, Anya gets on an blimp, and it's the bad guys' blimp. Anya is kidnapped, I guess. There's a funny scene about poop. Cool. Loid and Yor get on the blimp because Loid can pilot planes and Yor can jump into baggage holds. Cool.
This - all of this - is whatever. However, what follows next makes no sense and just makes the entire movie suck in the end. On the blimp, Yor has to fight a cyborg for whatever reason. Entirely made of metal, miniguns for arms, just a straight-up unkillable machine. What does she do? She learns to both deflect and dodge bullets from this freak in the middle of the fight. She slashes the hell out of his metal body with lighter fluid and blows him up because the blimp is exploding all around them and she uses that to ignite a path of lighter fluid to the robot.
This unbelievable amount of action - darting around, like Dragon Ball characters - metal monster, noise is so unlike anything the series gave before, it's like an entirely different show. This makes it awful. It's just a noisy, flashy fight and of course Yor wins.
Loid kills the bad man by using a gas mask and blowing out all the windows in the cockpit. Cool.
They all live happily ever after, until season 3 just makes it all tank to the ground even harder.
The one good thing is Yor got drunk and told Loid she loved him or something, I don't remember. Bad movie. Don't watch it if you like season 1 and 2. Go watch DBZ if you want to see what the cyborg fight's like. None of this movie matters in season 3, anyway.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Oct 22, 2025
The show started strong with a sense of dread and mystery. There was some character development and the story progressed well enough. However, the utter violence and gore, peer pressure, disregard to any morality in the later half of the series just makes it unlikable and disgusting.
Right off the bat, one notices that the protagonist is scared and feeble - something understandable in this show's context. His girlfriend, or whoever she is, forces him into dangerous and rather awful situations for her own sense of accomplishment. The school girl who kills spirits with her dolls is just... there for some cuteness factor. The cast is
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lacking and not really likable, nobody has a motive except the little girl.
The visuals are clean, but gore is the main subject. What other shows consider an exception, this show considers the norm. Flaying, evisceration, dismemberment of children and underage individuals - that's what welcomes you when you watch this. It's horrid, and nobody who has any sense of consciousness would consume this. Do you want to see a school girl chopped apart? Do you want to see a boy ground into meat balls and eaten by his mother? I don't. I didn't.
A father is forced to rape his daughter so she gives birth to malformed fetuses that end up killing them. The main evil spirit is a bunch of sperm infecting a pregnant woman. There is something deeply wrong with the entire affair.
Why would someone normal write this? Why would you like this and give this anything more than a three because objectively, the animation is good?
This is deranged. It's sad, lonely, and ugly. It is haunting if you have children, despicable in most aspects, and just shows you hate, violence, sadness, ugliness, coercion. Is it nice to look at? Only when blood isn't flying everywhere, because the animation is good. Is it drawn well? Well, yes. Yet, it's just spite and gore and disgust. It's viscera and obscenity morally and overtly. There's something wrong with you if you like it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Oct 7, 2025
Another season down - and for Yami Shibai, it was a good one. The last two episodes referenced both a former season and again touched on the narrator's story. It's nice that they had way fewer jump scares (if any? I don't recall.) and focused more on different types of stories this season - funny, spooky, sad, goofy - all were represented.
The pace was also dialed back, as in slowed, a bit for many of these stories and the visual style was overall good. This helped tell different types of stories than former seasons. They're all still what you kind of expect if you've been
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watching this over the years, but that's not a bad thing.
As time passes, I appreciate the shorter, less intense, approach of a lot of these episodes compared to other supernatural shows that focus way too much on explicit content or shock factor. One story this round was really not my cup of tea, but, hey, you can't please everyone.
For Yami Shibai, this is a solid outing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Sep 26, 2025
The style is on par with the previous season, but lacks the same appeal. It's flashy and in your face with surreal action sequences mixed with boring and bland filler. Character design is interesting, mostly, with the new main rival being well-designed and substantial. There is a lot to like about how the new arrival is introduced, what it makes you feel and how its story plays out this season. That shines and is actually interesting.
The rest? Pointless time is spent on introducing a plot-line that goes nowhere, a new protagonist that does nothing and is generic and one-dimensional with a shoehorned presence. A waste
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of time and just two episodes after this character is introduced, yet another one enters. They filled the main story-line with nothing new, they progressed no plot, they detracted from the larger picture by adding more school drama scenes than needed.
If it's an adaptation of the manga, perhaps more creative liberty should have been taken. It's utterly painful seeing Okarun struggle with his feelings toward Momoko and the writing feels lazy. "We're holding hands, oh, my, goodness. What if we're just friends. I'll ignore her," concurrently with, "Does he not like me? Where is he?" That kind of nonsense this deep in. Sprinkle in, "I'm the leader," "I went full throttle twice," "I love robots so much," "I want to murder," and you get the idea.
Get used to those lines because that's all you'll hear in the later half of this series. There is some character development that's just ripped away by the next episode - Something interesting happens between Okarun and Momoko and then it's just forgotten, they're back to their stupid, boring selves in an unbelievable, vivid world they should be living in.
Throw-away sequences, forgotten plot-lines, bad writing detract from a visual spectacle, again, with some very well-drawn and tended-to scenes. They could have done so much more with this, but just didn't. They have all the money they likely need because it's so highly produced, so smoothly animated it feels unreal sometimes, but fails to deliver anything worthwhile. If you want some progress, for a feeling of satisfaction, for anything except a fun time, you won't get it here. It's pretty, but it's also just contrived and too fast for its own good; it struggles from its success while bringing nothing of value to the big picture outside of a few standout moments.
Skip this unless you go fishing for those few scenes that bring anything of value - the musician exorcists and the rival's backstory are worth seeing. That's about it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 6, 2025
The stories have fewer jump scares and they overall feel more calm from previous seasons. There are a couple of positive - relatively speaking - episodes, too, rather than just evil spirits or malice. Surprisingly, I quite liked many of the episodes, when compared to the show as a whole.
The end theme and style is weird. Art style is still avant garde, but not just utter scribbles. If you liked the series up until now, this is actually better than usual. Characters react in believable ways, frequently, and the overall tone is more mellow than before. There are positive hauntings, negative outcomes, quiet episodes -
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there's a mix.
After finishing it, it's better than the previous season and the stories are also more engaging. It's difficult to condense an esoteric plot into four minutes, but this is a step up from season 13. This is a seven in the context of Yami Shibai. Nicely done this round.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Mar 6, 2025
Edit: The conclusion doesn't have any payoff, the drama and mystery - again - don't work well with logic, and I still can't recommend this. It's a five. There's just other stuff that's better and even though it's set in the present day, literally, the technology and education levels of most cast members, save Ameku herself, appear to be last-century. No medical knowledge required to... "enjoy," this show since it's illogical and uninspired to the very end.
This isn't right. The first six episodes are just filler-thriller nonsense. It's like they finally got their footing on episode seven and delivered on episode eight. The show is
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all over the place - it starts as some crime drama, but continues (again, on episodes seven and eight) as an emotional roller coaster in a hospital setting. This clashes with the dynamics set out before, where logic is barely relevant, emotions definitely are sideshows and the entire plot revolves around unbelievable, "mysteries."
I really, really don't like this show for a few reasons. It's brutal in the first few episodes to catch your attention. Oh, look, gore. Oh, look, corpses. It's dumb and cliche and makes next to no sense because it presumes every character besides Takao is dumb. It doesn't really end there. The show preys on your desire to see violence, so sprinkles it on in the first five episodes, then backs off because the plot doesn't really need more. Suddenly, it starts to take itself a little more seriously.
I'll be honest - after they stopped with the crime drama and got to the children's hospital section, it felt better, but not much. The plot still feels contrived, but they at least brought back several characters from the past. They filled in the gaps and introduced a new story, which culminates with episode nine.
Episode nine is what the show should have been the entire time. It's really, viscerally relatable if you have a child or have had children. Yes, you can imagine what happens, but this is the first time I felt anything here, in this bland and stupid, violent and pointless, show. The reason I'm writing this is episode nine and how it just hits differently for people with children. It's the only episode I'd recommend in this pointless mess to anyone because the rest? It's dumb. It's just a waste of time, and if you value your kids and your family, skip it all except episode nine. Don't even bother with episodes 10, 11, or 12.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Oct 12, 2024
It's more of the same - some stories are alright, others miss the mark, and others have jump scares. The ones with jump scares don't really work, the series could do with fewer of those. However, since this is season 13, it seems like resorting to some cheap tricks is expected. Overall, this is a solid six. It's not awful, it's not great, it's just alright. As usual episode 13 ties things together just a little more, and as the norm, each episode is a standalone story outside of that. Some of the art direction this season is a bit odd, a bit too much
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like scribbles.
This is so middle of the road it's a struggle to say anything at all. It just is, it's here, it sure is, yep. Good to watch to pass some time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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